Archive for the ‘Virgin Islands’ Category

Today in the earthquake maps there were more than 8 earthquakes of 2.5+ magnitude in the world within the last hour. The area North of Puerto Rico is full of small earthquakes after a big 6.4 a few days ago.

This increase of earthquakes is not usual. I report it here as is one of the signals Jesus said would be present prior to the start of the Tribulations.

I have posted articles before about the significance of 188 days between major earthquakes and their geometric patterns. The two articles posted here are exceptional in their scope and scientific knowledge.

It is presented to us in a simple and understandable manner that the average person can follow.

I just finished seeing the first of the two videos and it was great, As I said some parts of the video have been presented before by the same author.

Is the March 2013 the beginning of the Tribulations as the article in this blog about the Year of Perfect Order seems to imply?

The importance of earthquakes is manifested by the extensive damage that they can generate and most important our inability to predict or see it coming. well in the last few years this science has advance considerably. Not only the causes and conditions that generate the earthquakes but the design of buildings and other structures to resist these forces. As a structural engineer I know that the forces that these earthquakes generate can be modeled to analysis and design programs that make the structures safe up to a certain earthquake magnitude.

Big earthquakes past 7 magnitude are usually uneconomical to design except in very sensitive usage structures as hospitas important high rise buildings and power plants nuclear facilities ect. Case in point the Japan earthquake that generated a Tsunami that devastated several nuclear plants. In these cases the problem was the water strength and height.

More than all this scientific causes and effects the most important effect of major earthquakes and their quantity is the fact that they herald the Apocalyptic signs that Jesus said would be present prior to the Apocalypse and His second coming.

I want to point out to important things that this article beings, the first is that the San Andreas fault in California is the same type as the one in the article about Sumatra and in the past few months there has been a lot of activity in this fault. The second point is that there is a great amount of minor earthquakes around Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.

On the afternoon of April 11, 2012, one of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded — and now revealed to be among the weirdest — struck in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Sumatra. It’s a region all too familiar with geological catastrophe.

Eight years earlier, in December 2004, the third largest earthquake on record had ripped through a nearby region of the ocean floor. The magnitude-9.1 earthquake and the monstrous tsunami that soon followed killed more than 227,000 people in 14 countries,

So when a magnitude-8.7 earthquake (some put the magnitude at 8.6) shook the Indonesian island on that Wednesday afternoon earlier this year, many expected the worst. Yet, no monster wave appeared. A wave did come ashore, but it was a miniature tsunami, just 12 inches (31 centimeters) high.

New research published today (Sept. 26) in the journal Nature delves into the intimate details of this earthquake, along with the powerful, magnitude-8.2 quake that followed two hours later. The new studies add to an existing body of research that shows this was a remarkable event — one of the most surprising earthquakes ever recorded — and one that offers an unlikely snapshot of a geological process millions of years in the making.

Turning a corner

Data captured by a global network of seismometers on April 11 revealed almost immediately that this quake was a strike-slip earthquake — the sort that races along the San Andreas Fault. Strike-slip earthquakes occur when two sides of a fault jolt horizontally, displacing the ground sideways. Since these earthquakes don’t shove the ocean floor upward — a required move for tsunami generation — no deadly wave appeared. [April 2012 Sumatra Quake (Infographic)]

Tsunamis are typically the devastating handiwork of quakes known as subduction earthquakes. They’re the most powerful earthquakes on the planet, and they occur at plate boundaries, where one tectonic plate is grinding inexorably beneath another. When the bottom plate suddenly lurches deeper, a colossal amount of energy is released, unleashing the sorts of massive earthquakes and calamitous tsunamis that hit the Indian Ocean in 2004 and the coast of Japan in March 2011. [7 Craziest Ways Japan’s Earthquake Affected Earth]

It quickly became apparent that the April 11 earthquake was the most powerful strike-slip quake ever recorded. Which was strange.

Lay and his team set out to construct a blow-by-blow account of how the earthquake progressed, and what they found added to the quake’s mystique. This earthquake was able to turn corners.

“It’s totally unusual,” Lay told OurAmazingPlanet. It turns out that the quake began on one fault, streaking along at more than a mile per second, and, when it reached an intersecting fault, it ruptured that one, too. In all, it ruptured four different faults over the course of 150 seconds, unleashing an amount of energy equivalent to about four magnitude-8.0 earthquakes.

Lay said that, typically, when earthquakes spread to connecting faults, the rupture rips along faults that branch away from the initial fault like the branches of a river. These earthquakes raced along in a grid-like pattern, making 90-degree turns along faults that resemble a lattice.

“Here, they really do seem to go along perpendicular faults, and we haven’t seen anything like that with a big earthquake,” he said.

However, he said, the weird rupture pattern reflects the weird geological circumstances at play in the neighborhood where the earthquake hit. The April 11 earthquake occurred in a region that is giving birth to the Earth’s newest tectonic plate.

Birth pangs

The earthquake hit in the middle of the Indo-Australian plate, a plate that is being torn asunder. And in fact, it is this process that helped trigger this astonishingly powerful earthquake. In a way, the area where it hit was primed for a major earthquake — scientists just had no idea how major such an earthquake could be.

“It’s a pre-existing zone of weakness,” said Matthias Delescluse, a marine geophysicist at Paris’s Ecole Normale Supérieure and an author of another Nature paper on the earthquake published today.

The faults that the earthquake ruptured are, essentially, the bones of an ancient volcanic seam that once snaked across the ocean floor, giving rise to new crust. The system fell silent 45 million years ago, but the fractures it created in the tectonic plate are still there.

And this particular tectonic plate is undergoing some major stress, Delescluse told OurAmazingPlanet. “I like to represent it with the sidecar analogy,” he said. Think of the Australia region of the plate as a motorbike, and the India region as a sidecar. Both are hurtling northward at a fast clip — for a tectonic plate at least — at about 2 inches (5 cm) per year.

“Now imagine the sidecar — not the motorbike — runs into a wall,” Delescluse said. “The sidecar would compress, and the motor bike, depending on the violence of the shock, would finally detach from the sidecar.”

That wall that our India sidecar is hitting is the Eurasian plate. The colossal collision has produced some impressive side effects: the Himalayas, the highest mountains on Earth. Australia is able to continue its progress largely unhindered, because that portion of the plate is diving under another tectonic plate — a process that produces the sort of massive earthquake that hit in 2004.

The evidence suggests that the Indo-Australian plate began to be ripped apart between 8 million and 10 million years ago. The 2012 earthquake is just one of many that have likely ripped along the same region since this process began.

After millions more years of similar earthquakes, the ruptures will begin to favor a particular path, giving rise to a new plate boundary, and separating today’s existing plate into two.

Delescluse said that the singular earthquake measured in 2012 offers a glimpse of this process in unprecedented detail.

“This event is really illustrating what happened in the past and will happen in the future,” he said.

Because the continental plates are built differently than oceanic plates, which are far more brittle, it’s unlikely that such a colossal strike-slip quake could hit on land, Delescluse said.

Together, the papers offer an unprecedented look at the geological setup for the earthquake, how it unfolded second by second, and its aftermath.

“The fact that within six months we have understood this much — that is really quite impressive,” said Hiroo Kanamori, a professor emeritus at Caltech, and a revered figure among geophysicists. He was not involved in the research.

Kanamori, who has studied large earthquakes for decades, said that vast improvements in both the quality and quantity of instruments, and of methodology, has allowed the science to make unprecedented strides forward.

“If this had happened 40 years ago, it would have taken a few years to even understand what it was,” he told OurAmazingPlanet.

And although he said the event certainly was surprising, he noted that it’s only surprising from the perspective of a human lifetime — “not on the geological time scale,” he said.

Lay echoed Kanamori’s long-term perspective.

“When you’re dealing with a process that may be taking millions of years, we’re getting a very short window of observation from which to make generalizations about the past,” he said. “Astronomers can look farther away, and they can see farther back in time — we see what we see today,” he said. And the Earth may have more geological surprises in store, he said.

Latest Earthquakes Magnitude 2.5 or Greater in the United States and Adjacent Areas and Magnitude 4.5 or Greater in the Rest of the World – Last 7 days

This list contains all earthquakes with magnitude greater than 2.5 located by the USGS and contributing networks in the last week (168 hours). Magnitudes 4.5 and above are in bold font. Magnitudes 6 and above are in red. (Some early events may be obscured by later ones on the maps.)

The most recent earthquakes are at the top of the list. Times are in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Click on the word “map” to see a ten-degree tall map displaying the earthquake. Click on an event’s “DATE” to get a detailed report.

For the past short years I have been involved in the daily look at the USGS earthquake site to monitor the major earthquakes that have happened in the world as this is one of the signs that Jesus told believers that would increase prior to His coming.

At the end of this scientific article there is a mention that the same tectonic plate listed in the article lies along the San Andres fault in California.There are several posts in this blog that refer to what is happening lately along this line that is in the past few days recording a lot of big earthquakes that run from Costa Rica up to Alaska where we have had a 6.4 today.

Also the area around Puerto Rico is experiencing heavy activity. Yesterday I posted an article showing the correlation of the last major earthquakes and the period of 188 days which was due yesterday on the feast of Yom Kippur.

Many Christians have reported having dreams or visions of a major 10+ earthquake about to strike California. I was thinking of the possibility that it could occur of +or – a few days from yesterdays 188 days from the last one.

Planet Earth may be 4.5 billion years old, but that doesn’t mean it can’t serve up a shattering surprise now and again.

Such was the case on April 11 when two massive earthquakes erupted beneath the Indian Ocean off the coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, far from the usual danger zones. Now scientists say the seafloor ruptures are part of a long suspected, yet never before observed, event: the slow-motion splitting of a vast tectonic plate.

The first of the quakes, a magnitude 8.7, was 20 times more powerful than California’s long anticipated “big one” and tore a complex network of faults deep in the ocean floor. The violence also triggered unusually large aftershocks thousands of miles away, including four off North America’s western coast.

“It was jaw-dropping,” said Thorne Lay, a professor of Earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz. “It was like nothing we’d ever seen.”

At first, Lay wondered whether the computer code he used to analyze earthquakes was wrong. Eventually, he and other scientists realized that they had documented the breakup of the Indo-Australian plate into two pieces, an epic process that began roughly 50 million years ago and will continue for tens of millions more. Lay and other scientists reported their findings online Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Most great earthquakes occur along plate borders, where one plate dives beneath the adjoining plate and sinks deep into Earth’s mantle, a process called subduction. The April 11 quakes, however, occurred in the middle of the plate and involved a number of strike-slip faults, meaning the ground on one side of the fault moves horizontally past ground on the other side.

Scientists say the 8.7 main shock broke four faults. The quake lasted 2 minutes and 40 seconds — most last just seconds — and was followed by a second main shock, of magnitude 8.2, two hours later.

Unlike the magnitude 9.1 temblor that struck in the same region on Dec. 26, 2004, and created a deadly tsunami, the April 11 quakes did not cause similar destruction. That’s because horizontally moving strike-slip faults do not induce the massive, vertical displacement of water that thrust faults do on the borders of plates.

The type of interplate faults involved in the Sumatran quakes are the result of monumental forces, some of which drove the land mass of India into Asia millions of years ago and lifted the Himalayan Mountains. As the Indo-Australian plate continues to slide northwest, the western portion of the plate, where India is, has been grinding against and underneath Asia. But the eastern portion of the plate, which contains Australia, keeps on moving without the same obstruction. That difference creates squeezing pressure in the area where the quakes occurred.

The study authors say that over time, as more quakes occur and new ruptures appear, the cracks will eventually coalesce into a single fissure.

“This is part of the messy business of breaking up a plate,” said University of Utah seismologist Keith Koper, senior author of one of the studies. “Most likely it will take thousands of similar large quakes for that to happen.”

The quakes were also notable for triggering powerful aftershocks thousands of miles away. Though major quakes have been known to trigger aftershocks at great distance, they are usually less than 5.5 in magnitude. The April earthquakes triggered 11 aftershocks that measured 5.5 or greater in the six days that followed, including a magnitude 7. Remote shocks were felt 6,000 to 12,000 miles from the main quakes.

Fred Pollitz, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif., and lead author of one of the studies, said the quakes were extremely effective in transmitting seismic wave radiation around the world. Though Pollitz said the magnitude of the larger Sumatran quake is No. 10 on the list of quakes since 1900, no other temblor has triggered so many strong aftershocks so far away.

“It’s the most powerful earthquake ever in terms of capability of putting stress on other fault zones around the world,” he said.

Pollitz said the quakes were likely to teach seismologists about the physics of earthquakes, particularly those along strike-slip faults. That knowledge, he said, would certainly apply to California’s San Andreas fault, which is also a strike-slip fault.

Lay said that the Sumatran quakes were most surprising in that they were completely unanticipated by seismologists and that he did not expect the event to repeat any time soon.

The subject of this blog is about earthquakes. Why am I looking into these effects when the majority of the people tend to ignore it. For one they are prophetic sign posts that point to the Apocalypse and the coming of Jesus. It also serves to warn those that live in earthquake prone regions to beware and be as prepared as you can possibly be.

There are three areas that at the present bare watching, one is California, the other Costa Rica and its vicinity and the other the Virgin Islands. I am putting the maps of these areas and the link to the site. At the end there is a link to a video about the faults in California that are steaming and the narrator is speculating that a major one is about to hit.

This morning I read the article below and a few hours ago there was a big earthquake in the Pacific coast of Costa Rica.

These are definitive signs that the return of Jesus is at the door. The Holy Spirit is communicating to us the nearness of His coming in a thousand different ways and earthquakes is one way to call the attention of an indifferent world.

Of course those who do not know the Word of God have no way of knowing these are warnings He is sending us, so it is for those who are watshers to spread the word and warn people about it.

Three dead, 20 injured as major earthquake damages Costa Rica coast

Patients at Calderon Guardia Hospital in San Jose are evacuated after a powerful earthquake struck Wednesday near the Pacific coast of Costa Rica.

By M. Alex Johnson and Ian Johnston, NBC News

Updated at 3:35 p.m. ET: Three people died, two them from heart attacks, when a major earthquake hit northwestern Costa Rica on Wednesday, authorities said. At least 20 people were injured and two others were missing, but the Red Cross said those numbers could rise as damage assessment teams reached more areas.

The quake — initially rated at magnitude 7.9 but then revised by the the U.S. Geological Survey to 7.6 — struck at 10:42 a.m. ET at a depth of about 25 miles about 7 miles southeast of Nicoya. The town of 15,000 people is near the Pacific coast, about 90 miles from the capital, San Jose.

Government buildings, including the National Assembly complex in San Jose, were under evacuation orders, the newspaper La Nacion reported. Thousands of youngsters were sent home from school as a precaution against aftershocks.

A man died in Nicoya when a wall fell on him, said Vanessa Rosales, president of the National Emergency Commission. He wasn’t immediately identified.

A second person, identified only as an elderly man named Smith, died of a heart attack in San Antonio in Desamparados province, authorities said.

A woman from the Pacific coastal town of Carrillo also died from a heart attack during the quake, Eva Camargo, director of the hospital in Filadelfia, told the news service Terra. The woman was about 55 years old and had the surnames Rodriguez Machado.

Camargo said the hospital was treating at least 20 people for quake-related injuries.

Two other people suffered minor injuries at the Hotel Barceló Tambor Beach in Playa Tambor, said Alcides Gonzalez, mayor of the coastal town of Paquera. The nature of their injuries wasn’t immediately known, but Gonzalez told La Nacion that the resort hotel was damaged when a pipe collapsed. It couldn’t be immediately determined whether the victims were tourists or hotel employees.

Costa Rican President Laura Chinchilla Miranda met with the National Emergency Council and the International Committee of the Red Cross later in the morning. In a news conference monitored by NBC News, Chinchilla confirmed that several buildings had been damaged in the capital and called on residents of the western coast to remain calm.

Power was out in Puntarenas, capital of the province of the same name, where Monsignor Sanabria Hospital was evacuated for a structural review amid visible signs of damage. A bridge over the Sucio River collapsed in the town of Sarapiqui, local media reported.

Some roads were blocked by landslides, and the Red Cross said rescue teams were unable to reach some areas.

‘Everybody is crying’The National Volcanological and Seismological Observatory at Universidad Nacional reported more than 60 aftershocks between magnitudes 2 and 4 in the hours after the quake.

Jorge Marino Protti, a seismologist with the observatory, said the quake was the caused by subduction between the Cocos and Caribbean tectonic plates. It occurred generally beneath the Nicoya Peninsula, but “you can’t specify an exact ‘epicenter’ because the rupture zone was so wide,” Protti said in a briefing.

Victor Suniga, owner of another hotel, the Samara Tree House Inn, told NBC News that the quake was felt “very strongly.”

“Everyone ran from their businesses and homes into the street,” he said. “It was frightening. But there have been no reports of damage. Power was shut down for safety but is now beginning to return.”

Erin Morris, a college English teacher in San Isidro de Heredia, near San Jose, said, “People are definitely shaken up here.”

“We were in class when the building started rolling back and forth,” Morris, 30, who is from South Carolina, told NBC News by email. “Everyone stopped talking and held still for what seemed like an eternity before we jumped into action and quickly exited the building.

“As I walked out of the classroom, I noticed all the buildings out of the window shaking back and forth,” she said. “Everything was diagonal and skewed in the frame.”

Robert Torres, desk manager at the Hotel Rio Tempisque in Nicoya, said the quake was also felt there.

“All businesses in the town have shut down for the day and sent their workers home. There was power in the area following the quake, but it has been turned off for safety checks,” he told NBC News. He said he was unaware of any damage in Nicoya.